


that spark of electric blue

by TheTartWitch



Series: One-shots of AUs [25]
Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: Alien Boy!Peter Quill, BAMF Peter Quill, Gen, Peter is a badass, Peter starts showing traits a lot sooner
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-12
Updated: 2018-07-12
Packaged: 2019-06-09 05:34:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15260529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheTartWitch/pseuds/TheTartWitch
Summary: au of if yondu picked up the wrong kid but got too embarrassed to return him so he just carried on as normal, and poor Peter Stewart learns to shoot blasters and drive space ships instead.





	that spark of electric blue

When he is young, before the age of tears and begging for a return that will never come, his mother tells him his father was made of stars and had promised to return. Once, when the tumor gets too big and she starts to forget things, she tells him his eyes remind her of the last night they’d been together, when he’d frowned as he said goodbye, so terribly sad, and kissed her forehead before he’d gone. He spends the next few nights lying awake and connecting the dots in his mind, replaying the sound of a flatlining heart monitor until that shrill scream is all he can hear, until he smashes a chair into a wall and breaks them both. He’s _so angry_ , reaching out and pulling at the memory of a man who may not even exist, and his grandpa just sits and lets him do it, exhausted.

\--

He’s the odd one out at school ever since she died. He’s different, withdrawn. He’s still friendly, but it _feels_ faked. His smile fractures when it reaches his eyes, like it’s a diamond reflecting light through the wrong facets.

He hears a boy’s gone missing. Young Peter Stewart, poor boy’s parents. People will wonder for years where he went, sneaking glances at Peter Quill: only a parking lot away at the time of Stewart’s last known sighting.

When he’s sixteen and working his first job, he gets into a fight with his boss. There’s shouting and glaring; Peter’s boss threatens to fire him. Peter stands steady and stares right into the man’s eyes. Tod Miller feels as though he’s peering into a black hole, trying to count the seconds before it’s all over. He looks away. Peter leaves through the back door and says nothing about if he’ll be back the next day or not.

He does come, though, and Tod tries to hide the way his breath catches in his chest whenever their eyes meet, a tug, a building pressure within his sternum, connecting them. He feels simultaneously as though he belongs and as though he has never felt so alone.

\--

Peter’s twenty when his grandfather passes. He’d been sick for a while, not getting better, just like Peter’s mom. It hadn’t been a shock, and yet he still feels as though he never truly expected this ending. He holds a funeral; his grandfather’s old buddies hang about and drink and tell the best stories they remember, and while they’re all distracted he lays electric blue flowers on the grave and tries not to think of why they feel so familiar.

And that is how Peter Quill says goodbye.

\--

A few years later he is walking down a street, watching sunlight reflect off of shop windows and car windshields, when an enormous stormy blue mass begins taking over the town like the Blob. It swallows everything as Peter just stands there and watches. He doesn’t run like the others do. The mass feels familiar, like it’s calling his name, ruffling his hair, offering him lemonade from the pitcher made just that morning. He waits until it’s close enough to touch, aware of Mary Spence’s camera fixed on him like an all-seeing eye, and reaches out one hand. The mass stills beneath his fingertips, quivers in place, traces his palm with crackles of electric blue energy. Somewhere, he knows, someone young and terrified is crying. Someone is hurting them, someone they loved and trusted, and they are demanding justice and vengeance, and Peter Quill, Star Lord, boy of the galaxy eyes and man of electric blue, reaches across the vast empty space between them.

Feels something, an approximation of himself wreathed in the heat of dying stars, kneel beside the young person and ask what they want. Feels someone else pushing, furious, trying to force them out and away, but Peter is a Quill and has not backed down from a fight since his mother died still and alone, hand palm up on a plain white bedspread, and something inside him _knows_ that voice as though he’s heard it every day of his life and dreamt of it every night. He reaches, clenches a fist and slams it into the heart of the energy, rips the light from pretend bones and the voice from a lying mouth. He _takes_ everything, every last drop, and there is a great exhale like the gasp of someone who’s drowned but is alive again, expelling contamination.

He blinks open eyes the color of the flowers still going strong on his grandfather’s grave, hand still still against the mass, which has faded to a simple deep black. Mary Spence’s camera flickers to his left. He turns to blink at her, sleepy and heavy with storms, and she gasps and drops it, though it doesn’t break.

Peter turns away, towards his parked car, and starts walking, ignoring the imprints of his shoes’ soles burned into the concrete of the sidewalk.

\--

He is Star Lord, son of a living planet called Ego and a human woman, wielder of the power of hundreds of thousands of young lives thrown away like garbage because they lacked one small spark. Sometimes strange things happen. Sometimes you create a weapon and return to find it discovering how to wield itself against you. Sometimes you are too late, and that young weapon has decided you are not worthy of its service.

Peter Quill has not backed down from a challenge in nearly twenty years, and he certainly isn’t going to retreat from his deadbeat of a father, alien planet or not.

**Author's Note:**

> so i imagine the rest of his life with arcs of blue sparks following sudden arm movements. he has to relearn driving and opening doorknobs and washing dishes because physically he's so much stronger now. mary spence's camera is retrieved and the footage has the avengers going wtf and holy shit and aliens and stuff, and peter's just maintaining his grandpa's farm and leaving flowers the color of a neon sky on two graves and living a normal life pretty much. people in town get used to it. there's all sorts, you know, and they always felt there was something off about the quill boy, you know? and so what if his eyes are a little unsettling. no pupil, just all that blinding blue? well, he seems to see just fine, so whatever.


End file.
